I’ve got 99 Problems but CTI ain’t one!
Whats Poppin?
Change is an inevitability in life, and in Customer Experience that change has accelerated exponentially in the past two years. The pandemic has changed everything and for many Contact Centres, it has demonstrated the limitations of the traditional CPE based siloed Call Centre Solutions and has made people re-evaluate their wider approach to Customer Experience.
An exceptional customer experience requires two key foundational pillars:
1. Improved Advisor Engagement. Advisors need the tools to do their job well. They need the right information and features to deliver better rates of FCR, lower AHT and personalise customer relationships.
2. Streamlining of business processes. Make sure there is tight integration between disparate enterprise systems. Not only with UC solutions like MS Teams but even more importantly with those business-critical CRM solutions.
The best customer experience is data driven. Contact Centre driven customer experiences must step up to offer a personalised and low effort experience as users normally receive when ordering items from Amazon or eBay. Whilst many firms have stepped up their DXP solutions, too many rely on Contact Centre applications dominated by an agent desktop that takes up the whole of the agent's screen.
Lose Yourself
The best way to deliver a data-driven customer experience is via deep CRM integration across all channels. For many vendors, this is an uncomfortable concept because many Contact Centre user interfaces are built using a “Unified Approach”. Basically, this is where a vendor has built an agent’s user experience with their Desktop Application at the centre of the advisor's workspace.
However, more innovative businesses and brands have realised that there’s a better way to deliver a great customer experience. The core agent metrics we want to improve, such as higher rates of FCR, personalised journeys and lower AHT can be constructed around the premise that an agent requires access to all relevant information. This requires deep CRM integration and a streamlining of the Contact Centre workspace into a more consolatory interface that works with the CRM seamlessly rather than competing for dominance in the agent workspace.
This trend has been building for a number of years with challenger financial services and insurance institutions as well as some retailers pioneering this method to disrupt their industry by gaining a reputation for customer service excellence. However, the pivot to homeworking caused by the pandemic has expedited this. The advisor who works from home is often limited to a laptop with a single screen. They are lucky to have additional monitors. This has brought the fight for that screen into focus and led many CX leaders to question the established setup.
Award Tour
The Wavenet Virtual Contact Centre, powered by Five9 is at the forefront of this disruption. With deep integration into MS Dynamics and Salesforce, as well as the Agent Desktop Toolkit which can be used with any web-based CRM system, Wavenet has brought our integrated approach to CX into the market. Every single VCC deployment Wavenet have undertaken involves some form of CRM integration into industry-leading solutions such as MS Dynamics as well as proprietary, custom-built CRM solutions.
This model, whilst not only disruptive is proving increasingly popular, and its challenging pre-existing perceptions about the “right way” of working and expanding the choice and options that deliver Digital Transformation.
Furthermore, this move towards integrated CX is accelerating. This will challenge the existing CPE based shops, as well as many Unified CCaaS vendors who haven’t focused on developing strategic relationships with market-leading CRM vendors or developed a library of API’s to allow flexible integration into the wider digital ecosystem.
